An attack on science - by Richard... Tuesday, December 08, 2009

An attack on science - by Richard... Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Clive Crook in The Atlantic has an interesting perspective on "Climategate". 

Criticism based on the leaked or hacked emails (and documents) is not an attack on science, any more than criticising a particular journalist is to attack press freedom, or criticising a particular politician is to attack democracy. Trying to shut down criticism in the name of science is the real attack on science.

Meanwhile, scientist Bill Gray complains about indoctrination from the climate lobby.

The recent Climategate revelations, he says, are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.

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Failure in Iraq - by Richard...

In another valuable contribution to the remarkably sparse debate on the British occupation of Iraq, MP and former Grenadier Guard Adam Holloway has published a short paper headed, "The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership in Iraq."

Holloway takes the view that the Labour Government has suborned the Armed Forces from the very top to half the way down, creating a system that often enforces what is politically convenient, not what is militarily right. This systemic failure, he argues, began with the invasion of Iraq and continues to this day. This failure, he tells us, continues to prevent us from learning from our mistakes, and is condemning us to repeat them, as we are doing in Afghanistan.

More on Defence of the Realm.

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One rule for them - by Richard...

The Guardian is reporting that the UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray.

Apparently, developing countries have found out about a planned stitch-up engineered by the naughty "rich countries" like the UK, which proposes unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050. This means that people in developed countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

This is the so-called Danish text, which has invoked fury amongst some of the delegates. Since the general objective was to drag the economies of the developed world back into the Stone Age, one can see why they are so upset.

Furthermore, horror of horrors, the plan is to marginalise the role of the UN, handing effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank, despite the UN's stunningly successful administration of the Iraqi Oil for Food programme.

A "senior diplomat" has described it as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks". 

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one (possibly the same) diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

More shocks and horrors will doubtless follow. We are only in the second day of this 12-day slugfest.

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Independent? - by Richard...

Some news reports on the "Climategate" affair, says the BBC's Richard Black, might have given the impression that the UK's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and maybe the Met Office team that works closely with it too, has its own network of weather stations across the world and that somehow data from that network is collected, stored and processed separately from every other source of temperature data.

It's erroneous, says the man, and for pretty obvious reasons. If you have three or four major centres in the world doing climate analysis, why would they each set up and safeguard data from their own stations? Would a UK or US centre, for example, be allowed to set up its own weather station in Tibet? Would three agencies go through the financial and logistical pain of setting up their own instruments in Antarctica, say, when one could do it and share the data?

So all these "independent" organisations share the same data. And how does that make their results independent? And if they all apply the same "fudge factors", wouldn't their results all look very much the same? Unless we knew which raw data they used, what adjustments they made to those data, and what corrections they had applied during the processing of those data, how do we know what they are actually recording?

That is what Climategate was really all about – and none of the questions asked have been answered.

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Fudged? - by Richard...

This decade has been the warmest on record and this year is likely to be the fifth warmest, according to the World Meteorological Organisations's (WMO) assessment of global average temperatures.

The WMO released the preliminary data at the Copenhagen climate summit in what the Met Office, which contributed to the figures, admitted was an attempt to influence the negotiations over cutting greenhouse gases.

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said the Office analysed land temperature data using a computer code developed by CRU. She said CRU also supplied the Met Office with original data from some remote weather stations which had a significant impact on the global average.

Nuff said.

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Follow the money - by Richard...

The cap and trade scam explained. And the woman who invented credit default swaps is one of the key architects of carbon derivatives, which would be at the very centre of cap and trade.

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They ain't sinking - by Richard...

Mr President, you've been had (to put it charitably). You should pass on this message to the people of the Maldives. It is high time to release them from this terrible psychological burden.

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Kill the IPCC - by Richard...

A senior geologist drilling off the New Zealand coast has called for the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be "killed". 

"The IPCC's incompetence is manifest in its failure to detect the corrupt science that has for so long permeated the activities of the international jetsetters of the climate science power group," Professor Bob Carter, of James Cook University in Townsville, told the ABC.

He claimed that the course of climate history and change on Earth should be the domain of geologists, "not meteorologists and computer jockeys".

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The trappings of religion - by Richard...

Cranmer on carbon indulgences and other matters:

We [have] returned to the Dark Age of corruption, delusion, superstition and unreason. The Global Warming religion is as virulent and insidious as all mind-bending cults of absolute certitude, and yet it has become mainstream orthodoxy and infallible spirituality faster than any faith-based cult in history. It has its clerics and its passionate prophets; it has its machinery and lucrative industry; it has its urgent way and irrefutable truth. It awaits only its messiah.

The Copenhagen Summit is the Ecumenical Council for the religion of the age.

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Blatantly bogus - by Richard...

Says Anthony Watts:

Now, I want to be clear here. The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. 

This may be an isolated incident, we don't know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well.

And CRU? Who knows what they use? We're still waiting on that one, no data yet …

What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say "interesting" adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.

Says chief UN climate official, Yvo de Boer: four successive reports, peer-reviewed by 2500 scientists, have endorsed the finding that global warming was almost certainly a result of human activities. "I do not believe there is any process anywhere out there that is that systematic, that thorough and that transparent."

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Delingpole - by Richard...

... picks on Bob Ward and sundry other creatures of the night, gate-guardians of the Mann-made warming religion.

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The real criminals - by Richard...

For months, the UN climate change summit that began yesterday in Copenhagen has been billed as the world's last best hope to match the scientific consensus on global warming with a policy consensus. But now it turns out there is little of either, and Copenhagen looks like it will go down as one of the more remarkable cases of political hubris in recent memory.

So declares the Wall Street Journal which suggests that much of the momentum for Copenhagen is now driven by the alternative fuels industry and its investors, who stand to lose vast sums unless governments artificially raise the price of carbon. 

These, we are told, include our friends at Kleiner Perkins, the ecoventure capital fund that includes Al Gore as a partner. And of course that part of the political class congenitally eager to redistribute taxpayer monies also wants to dispense "carbon credits" to friends and political donors. 

I don't think the majority of people even begin to realise quite what how big a scam the "carbon" market really is. 

We saw yesterday an example of how one company, the Tata Steel Group, stood to gain £400 million a year from this market, without reducing in any way the amount of carbon dioxide produced. The alternative fuel industry, we know, actually consumes in total, more energy than it produces and the hugely inefficient wind industry survives only on a colossal raft of subsidies.

While Pachauri is eager to dismiss the sceptics as "criminals", these rent-seekers are the real criminals, and their are not victimless crimes. The money that Tata Steel so diligently milks from the system does not grow on trees.

It comes at the price of 1,700 jobless in Teesside – the dole for whom we are going to have to pay – the loss to the economy of the steel they produce, with a commensurate loss in tax income, and the additions to our household bills as utility companies buy the carbon credits from the likes of Tata so that they can continue generating electricity.

The real criminals though are the politicians whom we pay to protect our interests, to protect us from the rent-seekers and their ponzi schemes which have no other intent but to raid the public purse. 

It is all very well for them, as they will do tomorrow, to get excited about the pre-budget report but, while they will be agonising over a dozen or so billions, their compatriots are in Copenhagen planning a raid amounting to trillions - $45 trillion at last estimate.

And when it comes down to it, this is what Mann-made global warming is all about – money. It is "green" only in the sense that money – the once almighty dollar – is green. Copenhagen is robbery in broad daylight, and it is about time our opposition party made its voice known or, asThe Times indicates today, there is a very good chance that it is likely to remain the opposition for a very long time.

Their members could start by reading this from the National Post, which tells us why Climategate is so important, and then do something about it. Silence is not an option.

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The fight-back - by Richard...

It would be too much to expect the warmists to take "Climategate" lying down one it had built up a head of steam. Recognising the danger, they were bound to fight back, although it has taken them a little to marshal their forces.

Ever-obliging, Louise Gray of The Daily Scarygraph has come waddling to the rescue with a headline in her warmist rag proclaiming: "Copenhagen climate summit: Sceptics 'willing to resort to illegal acts to stop deal'".

Climate sceptics, we are told, are willing to resort to "illegal acts" to stop a deal on global warming, the United Nations top scientist has warned on the opening day of key climate change talks in Copenhagen.

This is the railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri again, but little Louise always awards him the accolade "top scientist" – which, of course, he isn't – although he usually gets the handle "top climate scientist" or some such.

It is interesting though how the warmists-in-high-places have decided on their narrative. Says Pachauri: "The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC."

Since the emails (no mention of the computer code) have been "stolen" there is no need to do anything about them. But, as with the rest of their belief system, there is no good evidence that they have indeed been "stolen" – an odd choice of words anyway ... "unauthorised release" might be more accurate.

If, as many suspect, the material was released by a "whistleblower", then there is actually nothing illegal in the act. This, the warmists cannot countenance and, as always, Louise Gray is right there bolstering their mantras with a dogged devotion that must surely earn her a premier place in "climate heaven" when she shuffles off this mortal coil.

Now, however, in the "climate hell" of the summit, the parties are digging in for the long haul. Little Louise's dreams may have a little longer to come to fruition, but no one can say that she isn't doing her very best to make them come true.

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And a day of madness - by Richard...

The day the US EPA declared a life-giving gas a pollutant. I did not think it was possible for mankind to be that stupid.

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In the grip of madness - by Richard...

"Despite the e-mail controversy," says Time Magazine, "momentum on climate change action is still building."

Environmentalists are feeling increasingly hopeful that the Copenhagen summit could produce concrete action on emissions cuts, with U.S. President Barack Obama changing his schedule to arrive on the final day of negotiations. "The clock has ticked down to zero," said the UN's climate chief Yvo de Boer on the first day of the talks. "After two years of negotiation, the time has come to deliver." There's nothing invented about that urgency.

Putting a Union Jack on it, The Daily Mail reported: "'Climategate' dominates Copenhagen talks as Government's top scientist accuses hackers of sabotage." It was a British scientist, of course. 

UK climate change secretary Ed Miliband admitted that the e-mail row had been detrimental to the battle to convince people that global warming is a real threat and says there is "a long way to go" to persuade the public. But he branded critics who argue the problem is not caused by humans "profoundly irresponsible", insisting that view flies in the face of scientific opinion.

"The overwhelming consensus of scientists across the world is that climate change is real and is man-made and is happening," he said. "Convincing the public is difficult because the threat is not one that can be seen or felt, he added. "It's not an army massing on our borders and people are focused on other things in their lives."

But then we got to the meat of the issue: "There are also people who want to cast doubt on the science therefore it's not surprising that some people are not convinced. Therefore, we have to redouble our efforts, the scientific community has to redouble its efforts to persuade people," he declared.

Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is pushing European leaders to commit to deeper cuts in carbon emissions in an attempt to seal a global deal. He hopes the EU will agree to cut its output of "greenhouse gases" by 30 percent on 1990 levels by 2020 – a cut 10 percentage points deeper than Europe is currently offering. 

We are in the grip of madness.

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A fuss about artwork - by Richard... Monday, December 07, 2009

Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of East Anglia – he of "arsehole" fame, has been given a guest slot in The Times to defend his beloved CRUddites.

"Climate change e-mails have been quoted totally out of context," his piece is headlined, with the strap ironically stating: "If this was a conspiracy, it wasn't a very successful one." It is ironic, of course, because the piece itself is part of the ongoing conspiracy – one in which the MSM seem to be happy to contribute.

Despite (or because of) his performance on Newsnight, Watson likes to describe himself and his CRUds as "We non-media-savvy scientists at the University of East Anglia". But he then demonstrates his grasp of the media by offering The Times a naked lie, which the paper happily imbibes.

The "hackers" he thus claims, have "picked choice phrases out of context ... And context is all: without it, these statements look awful." With the context, of course, they look even worse – but not by the time Watson has weaved his skein of lies.

Phil Jones and his "trick" to "hide the decline" is, therefore, perfectly innocuous. All Phil is doing is "talking about a line on a graph for the cover of a World Meteorological Organisation report, published in 2000." There! You see! What could be more harmless than that. He was working on a bit of graphic art, you silly people.

The fact that this "artwork" was to be used in the 2001 IPPC report, of course, is neither here nor there.

But never mind boys and girls. Climate sceptics would have us believe that the CRU data is invalid, and that the 20th-century warming is a construct entirely in the minds of a few scientists ... and all because of an e-mail about a bit of artwork.

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Leaked! - by Richard...

Small Dead Animals has a masterful analysis of why "Climategate" had to be a leak rather than a hacker. The analysis is set out here. There is no value in my summarising it. The arguments should be savoured as a whole.